The prices for engineers are quite high, and the PR cost in importing them is also quite high, so they're pouring money into education as a long-term investment in driving down the cost of developers in the future.

and deaths, when they happen. First hacking death, e.g. by someone messing with a defib remotely? (This possibility was discussed in a defcon talk last year) Well if they're not protected as common carriers, things could get interesting.

Nope. See, the way it was done was by employing ~19,000 to go forward with the mission, but at some point, a small team running maintenance on the mission mid-transit realized the mission failed when the probe was popped 2/3rds of the way through its flight. A plan was hatched with the NSA to use existing test code from the development effort to emulate signals from the probes at all the telescopes capable of listening to it. The NSA's role would simply be to install the interception equipment at the telescopes to man-in-the-middle the responses from the telescopes to the relevant computers in such a way that the expected test data would be injected. Therefore, you only had a small team of maybe ~50 which was involved in covering up the failure of the operation, including a few graphic designers who could create astounding mockups of Pluto and Charon extrapolated from a combination of the Hubble 2010 image with artistic direction guided by existing photos of Triton, a body very similar to Pluto. Introduce a scary software glitch mid-flight because nothing ever goes 100% right. As far as the ~19,000 knew, the mission succeeded.

OR, the glitch a weekish before the rendezvous was the point where the graphic design and emulation teams would have to be brought in. THAT's what happened! It's just that the probe was unrecoverable from a software glitch!

A contractor is free to decide when and where the work is done. So Uber does not fit the contractor model.

And before anyone disagrees with this, I should note in duckintheface's favor that Uber penalizes drivers who decline too many fares, especially drivers of upscale services such as UberBlack who turn down too many UberX fares. Ergo, drivers cannot reasonably decide which work to take, reinforcing duckintheface's point.

The only times we've ever heard of the US actually doing anything were with Stux and its variants, and that was always after they had done their damage. There really wasn't much of anything else, so there's no real way to know who's better because of the clandestine nature of these operations anyway.

At the very least, we know the Chinese are prolific, but we have no idea if the Chinese are better, the Russians, the United States, the Israelis... heck, maybe the Brits upstaged everyone. It's impossible to know.

Asking because it seems they've used electric motors in a more direct capacity to allow them to ditch a traditional gearbox altogether, and since electric vehicles and supercars are both points of experience for you, you're in a unique position to share insight on where this kind of technology might end up.